Reflection

Part One
This semester in Mrs. Turner's class, I have written a total of four essays. Out of those four, I picked two that I thought were the best and put them in the blog. The first was a memoir about my experience getting my black belt and the second was about a nature walk. In the memoir I was writing about the memory of getting my black belt. I was trying to express the different challenges that I went through and how hard I worked to come this far. The main idea of my memoir would be that as hard as it was and as long as it took, I accomplished something that was awesome and I am very proud of that. In my essay on the nature walk, I was writing about the different things that I saw in the woods, how that made me feel, and how it related to Emerson and Thoreau. In this piece I was trying to figure out if I thought the experience in the woods was a good thing and if i agreed with Emerson and Thoreau. The main idea of the nature walk essay would be that the nature walk experience we a good thing, it helped you find yourself, and that I agreed with Emerson and Thoreau.
When I was writing the memoir, one thing that I was really working on was using the brush strokes to make my writing better. This was a very challenging process because of the way that you had to structure your sentences. When was writing my nature piece, I was working on using commas correctly in the sentences. In both pieces, I was trying to use very descriptive words so that you could fully understand my experiences. When I was thinking about what I was going to write, I thought in a very descriptive way and I tryed to reflect that in my writing. Three things that I have learned in this class so far that has helped me with my writing would probably be eliminating passive voice, using absolutes, and shifting adjectives out of order in my writing.

Part Two
In both of my writings I had some revisions because my two pieces are far from perfect. In the essay "Black Belt" I had to do a lot of revising involving taking out passive voice. I was trying to eliminate words like I, am, is, are, was, and be. This was probably the hardest part of writing that essay. I had to rearrange the sentence that was talking about the things that were required for my black belt, because it was a little confusing. In my nature walk essay, I had to do some of the same things. I had to revise my introduction and conclusion paragraphs so that I wasn't using so much passive voice. I also added a few more sensory details so that my audience could understand more about what I saw.

Part Three
As I was reading through some of my classmate's blogs, I found some things that I really liked about their peices that I didn't have. In Amanda's peice "The Scaffold in The Scarlet Letter," I liked the way that she used her quotes. The quotes that she used went very well with what she was explaining. I also thought that she did a very good job explaining how her quotes went with what she was talking about and it is something that I could use in future essays because it is always important to support your ideas with the text.
I also read Erika's essay on our nature walk and I think that it was very well written. One thing that I really liked about her essay and that I would like to use in my future essays would be that she used very good examples. In my pieces I used examples from the text, but Erika used just an everyday example to show what she was talking about. I would really like to use this in my future pieces.
The third thing that I wan't to remember for future writings would be from Natalie's Scarlet Letter essay. Her conclusion on that essay was very strong and helped me out a lot. My conclusions in my writings are always very weak because I don't ever really know what to talk about or how to word it. By reading the conclusion on Natalie's essay, it kind of refreshed my brain so now I can make my conclusions stronger.